Life As Nick Starr

I started a 2nd job 2 weeks ago. It wasn’t something I really wanted to do, but I’m trying to save up for a truck, so getting a second job sounded like a good way to jump start this effort.

The job was processing criminal background checks. This sounds more glorious then it was. The background checks were done by agents the company has throughout the nation, as well as online searches. My job was only to type in the information found in the check.

Well the first week was training. The “trainer” like myself had a day job, but she seemed to take this second job less serious. She would basically tell us to go through the powerpoint slides on a chapter and take the test. The training manual said for her to go through the slides with us so that we would be taught something by her. She decided that we should just learn on our own while she surfed Yahoo, MSN, eBay, and other online shopping sites.

Oh well, so she wasn’t the best trainer in the world. The problem was that there was only 2 people in the entire training class. This Hispanic girl and myself. The trainer couldn’t find the time to go through the material with us? Anyway moving on.

She did help us when we had questions while taking the test. I say help, what I really mean is she would press the button on her screen (which was visible to us on the projector) to show what the correct answer was.

Well there was one question where the answer on the screen was one thing, yet the training had said something completely the opposite. There apparently was constant changing of this item, so she left to find out the current and correct answer. She was gone for about 20 minutes, and I had a question on one of the test items. In following the same manor on which she had “trained” us by simply displaying the answer on the screen, I walked up to her desk and pressed the button to see what the correct answer was. She would of done this herself if she wasn’t off who knows where for the past 20 minutes.

BTW on all of the tests so far I hadn’t gotten worse then a 95%. I tend to grasp things pretty quickly, so this training seemed like it was dragging on forever.

Training was supposed to run from 5p-10pm daily, but we would be out of there by 7pm at the latest. The first day I didn’t mind, but I was there for a paycheck, and getting pair hourly I wasn’t getting as much as I had hoped for.

Come the following week, I go in and things seem a bit off. We still hadn’t gotten our badges to get in the building, so we would be stopped by the security guards and held up. The previous week they would just let us in, but they weren’t letting me in until someone came and signed me in.

I get to the training room, and I log onto the network with the generic training login; however, my personal training password isn’t working. Strange. I ask the other girl in the training class and she is able to get in. Huh. Well it turns out one of the supervisors comes in and pulls me aside telling me they have decided to terminate my employment.I asked why, and they said they had screen shots of me cheating on the test. WHAT? How can I be cheating when the teacher is essentially giving us the answers we don’t know? Turns out there was a security camera in the room, and they had seen the footage of me checking one of the answers. The trainer wasn’t smart enough to do this as some sort of a “setup,” non the less I was without employ at this place any longer.

Easy come, easy go I guess. I’m still looking for a second job, and maybe even a third depending on what my schedule is like. I have some pretty big plans that I would like to see come to light. Need to start saving up pretty big for it all to fall into place. If it all works out, and I will give more details as plans are more concrete, I will be blogging quite a bit more from far beyond Tampa Bay.

Stay tuned…